Add support for simple text based video editing via subtitle

[Dean-Corso]

Hello @mifi,

just have another possible request I would like to tell you. Lately I was looking for any kind of text based video editor tools but unfortunately I just found Premiere Pro from Adobe only or some Online based sources etc you can do some audio transcription and then you can edit your video by the text of it.

Now, I'm not talking about the "audio transcription" itself about my request here now so what I want is to find any video editor like yours "lossless-cut" which could handle text based editing via loaded subtitle files (srt, vtt etc). So that would be an similar good feature and the only thing you need is a subtitle of your video what you can create with other free tools. Now I have my video and the subtitle for this video which I wanna load into lossless-cut and activate the text editing mode. In this case I need to have an new window next to the editing window where I could read all the subtitle text and jump to any sentence I want and the video editor should also jump to that time code of the sentence. So at the end I just want to read my subtitle in a window to follow a speech for example and I wanna build a own cut. So the principle is super simple but highly effective when you want to edit podcast, speeches, news or movies or whatever you want. As I said, unfortunately I didn't found any other video editors who support text based editing with subtitles (simple text based editing no transcription based editing) yet except that Adobe Premiere Pro I don't wanna buy, use & install (big size app I don't need). Just wanna do simple edits like I can do with lossless-cut + including the simple text based editing via subtitle in the future maybe. What do you think about that idea?

I found a tool called SubtitleEdit on GH where you can build / edit subtitles. Just load your video + subtitle and then you can jump to any sentence you want and on the right lower side you can see an audio wave form which really look great and there you can also scroll through the video / sentence and change the marker etc. But this you can only do for subtitle itself in that tool. I want to have almost the same but only exception is that I don't wanna edit subtitle I want to edit the video itself with it. Jumping to any sentence and now I see the selected part where I can adjust them like I want and create an video selection of it to put this selection into the selection list of lossless-cut as usual. So all in all I would love it to have an text based editing feature. So what do you think about it? Would it be possible for you to add such an feature in LC? There is not much to do so the only thing you have to do is reading the subtitle itself and jumping to time codes of them etc. It's more like a break point list in a debugger you can jump to any of them in the list etc. But as I said, I think that many people would like to have such an feature in LC. Thanks.

[mifi]

You basically want to have a "side bar" of some sorts where you can see the whole subtitle, line by line, and the ability to search for text and click on a text to jump to the timecode? I think that's a cool idea and could be very useful for people navigating videos by subtitles.

could be combined with #2072

[Dean-Corso]

Hey @mifi,

thank you that you found a minute to give me an answer. 😃 Yes, it is a cool idea (GREAT) because these days it is possible to create almost perfect subtitles for any video/audio in any language you need. The next step would be to have any video/audio editor tools who can work with those subtitles so that we as user can really simple navigate through the whole video just by reading / searching any word's or text phrases and quickly jump to those time codes in the video right away where we can edit make your desired selections you want to put them into the right side as usually you can do in lossless-cut. On that way the user can simply create own selection sets the user want to output at the end etc.

Just believe me, it's just a great idea if you add such a ability in lossless-cut. There is also not really much code because at the end you just jump only to the time codes of the subtitle files the user does click on it. Some search function too and Hocus Pocus the magic is done. Its just a simple feature to add but it has a huge effect and I think all people who working much with subtitles will LOVE it.

If you add such a feature then I will also check this out and send feedback about whether it would need some improvements here and there etc. Just give it a try and we will see. Thanks.